Most of the users do not think that they need VPN services at all. You usually begin to think about using a VPN only in case your IP is blocked on the website or if the content you need is blocked in your country. That is totally the wrong approach to the security and privacy issues and below you will find out why.

Choose a VPN for Your Operating System

However, before disclosing the essence of VPN it would be a good idea to mention that if you are going to use a client (not a browser extension) for your Windows 10 VPN service should support your operating system (some of those don’t). The same thing is applicable to your mobile device – the operating system (Android or iOS) matters.

What Is a VPN?

A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is the separate protected network or the tunnel in the unprotected Internet. Try to imagine it. Let us assume that you decided to give safe remote access to non-staff employees for operation with certain resources of an internal network of the office. It is possible to create such conditions using three methods:

To build the personal channel using the twisted pair cable, optical fiber or wireless technologies we can use this method only for small distances – no more than several hundreds of meters;

To acquire or rent the channel from a provider. In this case, the provider offers VPN with direct optical fiber, L2-VPN or L3-VPN (service of the virtual private area network) – this method works for unlimited distance but in an area of coverage of provider. And the price for the service would be affected by that distance.

The third option allows using the VPN tunnel everywhere where there is an Internet access. It is performed by means of the tunneling protocol of GRE network packages or the whole set of the protocols providing data protection of IPSec.

The third option is very convenient, it is used in most cases and that is why we are going to discuss it below.

Advantages of VPN

First of all, it is necessary to tell about advantages of VPN and to mention why it is usually used. The first and very important point is that this technology allows ciphering the transferred traffic between clients in the Internet using the VPN server.

Besides, the technology allows to hide the operating IP address and to remain on a network anonymously, to get access to other networks or to download the file from the website where IP addresses from certain countries are forbidden. So using VPN can let you avoid the limits implemented by third parties very easily.

Moreover, you get the huge advantages when it comes to privacy as it is very hard to associate your VPN IP with your own IP offered by a provider (if executed correctly).

Today the free Wi-Fi on the city streets, in cafes and hotels became a common thing. You can be connected to a wireless network from the notebook or the smartphone and check mail, make a purchase or to login the account of a social network absolutely free of charge.

However, using the public and unprotected network without VPN is unsafe, in this case, you permanently risk to lose passwords or confidential data by acquiring

the unprotected traffic generated by the third parties. You may think that as an ordinary user you have nothing to hide, so the VPN is only necessary to be used by an online business. That is not true. If you have made a purchase at least one time using your smartphone or notebook, if there is any personal or financial data in your device – all of these could be stolen if you use the unprotected connection.

Advantages of VPN for Business

As we already have considered use of VPN as a proxy server it would be a good idea to point out its benefits for the business – which is about the outstanding value of creating a corporate protected network. If constructed properly the only way the data can leak from the corporate network is a physical hack of servers or computer containing vital information.

How VPNs Work?

So, we understood why VPN is necessary, now we will talk about how it is arranged. So if an office has an internal network with the server, it is possible to connect to it computers from different offices from all over the world. This is usually done to grant remote workers an access to the primary server data storage.

So at first there has to be created a VPN tunnel that leads to the server from the remote computer. Now the worker that uses the computer can become authorized via the Internet in the VPN server and get access to the information provided to it. At the same time data transfer within the tunnel will be protected by encoding and accepted information will be safely protected from third parties outside the VPN.

Conclusion

Reliability of VPN traffic is proven by the fact that even if any hacker somehow will be able to intercept transmitted data, it will be very hard to decrypt the acquired information. Threat of infection with the VPN with a virus is insignificant, too. in case the VPN server is set up correctly asit checks what data is included into an internal network.